Nogacom, an Israeli developer of information governance solutions, has launched a white paper presented a new best-practices approach to data governance which recommends that companies first classify their unstructured business data, and then plan the appropriate strategies to govern it.

This approach is detailed in a new white paper, entitled “Classify First, Plan Later: A new approach to effective data governance through data classification” available today on Nogacom’s website at http://www.nogacom.com/classify_first.html

Most corporate data environments are pretty chaotic. Companies have a huge number of files containing unstructured data scattered all across their IT environments including Word documents, PDF files, emails, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. with more and more of these files created every day by users across the organization.

Users are also freely storing, sharing, copying and re-purposing the content of these files - often with little regard for security and compliance best practices - whether deliberately or inadvertently. This chaos directly translates into lost business opportunities, revenue and productivity, and exposes the company to regulatory compliance failures together with significant financial and legal liabilities.

“Data classification is the only way to take control of the data environment and effectively govern it. The conventional approach to data classification dictates that you first plan your data governance strategy and then implement it with appropriate data classification schemas and technologies that address your specific governance challenges and needs.

“But in reality this approach has proven to be fundamentally flawed, difficult to apply and ineffective. As a result companies still find themselves exposed to the significant risk of compliance failures,” said Thomas Quednau, Nogacom’s CEO.

Nogacom recommends a new approach whereby the steps are reversed: first companies should classify their unstructured data using its NogaLogic information governance solution, and then they should plan relevant and effective data governance strategies based on real-world intelligence gleaned from the data classification process. This approach eliminates the significant challenges, complexity and fear that companies have of implementing a data classification process, and helps avoid unnecessary spending on technologies, infrastructure and consultants.

Nogacom’s NogaLogic is a data classification solution for information governance that automatically identifies and classifies unstructured data based on its business context and value to the specific company. It also provides detailed reports that analyse where business data is stored and how it’s being used across the organization. NogaLogic is fully automated, and does not require pre-requisites such as data classifications schemas, keyword lists, manual categorization work or end-user involvement.

To learn more about the NogaLogic approach and solution, download the White Paper at:http://www.nogacom.com/classify_first.html